Tuesday, March 31, 2020

The Makioka Sisters flows - Would she be able to stand the ordeal of a permanent wave?

The Makioka Sisters (1946-8), Junichiro Tanizaki’s UNESCO-stamped novel, was a puzzler.  It has two conceptual levels.  One of them took me quite a while to figure out.  The other was clear early on.

The stuff of the novel is not the ordinary life of the bourgeois Osaka family in the title, but the events of ordinary life.  Holidays, restaurant meals, trips to Tokyo, the terrible Kobe Flood of 1938, illnesses, that sort of thing.  This novel has more variety of illness – beriberi, dysentery, gangrene, scarlet fever, and many more – than any novel I can remember, yet not implausibly so.  It is all perfectly plausible.

The narration is distant and the prose is fairly flat.  There is little description, little metaphor.  What struck me the most was the evenness of the tone.  Every event is told with the same emphasis.  The flood, a natural disaster that killed hundreds, receives more pages but the same rhetorical weight as a meal at a favorite sushi restaurant.  The sushi chef gets two long paragraphs, and is never seen again:

She first gave them a description with gestures: he looked like the dwarf with the enormous, mallet-shaped head one sees in illustrations to horror stories; he turned customers off most haughtily, and he attacked a fish with his carving knife as though it had insulted him.  (2.30, p. 293, tr. Edward Seidensticker)

Hey, that has description and metaphor!  I know, it is not a typical sentence.  How about this:

He always used white Kobe vinegar, never yellow Tokyo vinegar, and always a thick soy sauce not seen in Tokyo.  He offered only fish taken before his very eyes, so to speak, here along the shores of the Inland Sea.  (293)

A list of fish follows.  The writing is precise and thick with stuff, counting etiquette and customary behavior as a kind of “stuff.”

Here, this passage is more typical:

To forget the sadness [of the younger sister moving out], they would go to Kobe every other day or so and search out old movies and new movies, and sometimes they even saw two movies a day.  Among the movies they had seen in the last month alone were Bagdad, Das Mädchen Irene, Hélène, Burgtheater, Boys’ Town, and Suez.  (3.12, 383)

As much as I enjoyed the list of films from around the world, the word “among” shows how this narrator works.

How about some interiority, while in line at the beauty shop:

Sachiko looked nervously at her sister, silent and dispirited.  Might Yukiko faint with hunger?  Would she be able to stand the ordeal of a permanent wave?  (3.30, 491)

Tanizaki has a powerful sense of anti-climax.  Here is the end of a chapter where something almost melodramatic has happened:

Then, as if she remembered something, she opened her cosmetic case – she tried not to let [her daughter] see – and poured the cap of the pocket flask a third full of brandy.  (2.18, 239)

One more:

Sachiko had been taking down [from a radio broadcast] recipes said to be good for the season.  Now someone was reciting a Nō play.

“Would you turn it off, please, Koi-san?”

“Wait.  Look at Bell.”  Taeko pointed her jaw at the cat, asleep by Sachiko’s feet.

Bell was drowsing happily in the warmth from the stove.  Taeko had noticed that its ears twitched at each drum beat.  Only the ears were affected, it seemed, by a reflex of no concern to the rest of the cat.

“What do you suppose does that?”

“Very strange.”

They watched, fascinated, as the ears twitched an accompaniment to the Nō, and when the Nō was finished Taeko turned off the radio.  (3.12, 385)

And the novel just moves on like this, for five hundred pages.  Donald Keene, in Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers (1953) wrote that “Here, then, is a true roman fleuve, a slow and turbid river of a book, which moves inevitably and meaninglessly to its close” (108).

Meaninglessly!  To a reader interested in Japanese culture, many episodes – the sushi restaurant, the cherry blossom festival, the firefly hunt, you name it – are deeply interesting.  Are they more interesting than the equivalent passage in, say, an oral history of 1930s Japan?  Does fiction of this type have any advantage over non-fiction?  I have some doubts.  But tomorrow I will try to undo “meaninglessly” by looking at the Big Irony.

22 comments:

  1. It is so true about the evenness of tone, catastrophic flood receiving the same attention as the sushi restaurant. I find along with the evenness, a sort of flatness, too. No one seems to be very upset about anything! There is no drama of an outward nature; if any emotion is to be found, it is within the characters themselves, not around them.

    I think Donald Keene’s word “meaninglessly” is absurd. There is a lot of meaning, about family dynamics for one thing, and a lot to ponder. Just like all famous families, the Oblonsky’s, for example, or the Buddenbrooks, for another, they become part of my mental landscape...another marker for my board on how this game of life is played. It was all the more fascinating to me because it was Japanese.

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  2. Would a different family have any different meaning, though? Or is it all arbitrary? That's what Keene is wondering, and me, too. Would different choices of incident matter much?

    The oral history I imagine also contains lots of sociological meaning about family dynamics, and is full of interesting Japanese cultural detail. What is Tanizaki doing that the sociologist is not?

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    1. You ask such good questions, Tom, which I do not really have an answer for. However, Stephen left a quite insightful comment on my blog post, and leaves us with his thought as to the purpose of the novel as this: “That life is full of suffering and tragedy and failure, but without beauty we are nothing.” Any thoughts?

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    2. He meant that as a summary of the purpose of the novel? I had not taken it that way. I do not really see the argument that Makioka is making that argument. If I ever get this next post written, the argument will not have anything to do with beauty. This is one weird novel to justify on the grounds of beauty. See that last sentence (which will be in my post, once I write it).

      He does say the line you quote "says everything," which would be a lot. The statement, on its own, is not something I believe is true. We are something with beauty, but we are also something without beauty.

      If anyone wants to see what I am babbling about, scroll down to Stephen's comment. I don't get it!

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  3. “That life is full of suffering and tragedy and failure, but without beauty we are nothing.”

    That is not a novel, that is pop philosophy. Novels are about language and the world and characters and their connections and how the novelist arranges them and the figurative language used to tie things together (and therefore language and more language). The importance of beauty is a chess piece that can be played by one of the characters ("I say, Quimby, life is full of suffering and tragedy and failure, but without beauty we are nothing!") but, like any other abstract idea, is fatal as an actual driver of a novel.

    As for Stephen's comment, I don't like this at all: "Since I’m a man I wasn’t thinking of the four sisters in terms of identification; I was thinking of each woman’s attractiveness..." That's a terrible way to read and a terrible way to approach half the human race.

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  4. The beauty argument fits badly with this novel. It is more Zola than Flaubert, so to speak. The frequent descriptions of disease are more or less clinical. No attempt to beautify or romanticize.

    I have wondered if the practice of "identification" is one of the great divides between types of readers. I am not much of an identifier, and never have been.

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    1. I am a huge identifier, so to speak, able to connect with well-written characters as if they were real. It’s a wonder we can communicate so well about literature, although sometimes when I read your posts, and others’ comments, I feel I’m in a bit over my head. Nonetheless, I enjoy trying to grasp all you and your blogging buddies say.☺️

      I am still thinking about the beauty comment, and while it is not a comprehensive summary of the novel, there is some validity to it on a certain level. The Japanese, from my reading, and my time there, are very occupied with “beauty.” Not in a commercial type of way I often see in America. I mean, in their presentation of food on a plate, the tying of a kimono, the spareness of architecture, bonsai, or haiku. It’s almost anywhere you look. So, to me, the idea of beauty carries some weight as it pertains to this novel and to the Japanese culture.

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    2. Oh you don't have to tell me about the Japanese obsession with beauty. I loved it. I think that's the most direct thing I ever wrote about Japanese aesthetics - also linked to a Japanese Literature Challenge.

      I have been to the same Kabuki theater (rebuilt) visited by the characters in the novel. Oh yeah!

      The surprising thing about Makioka, what needed some interpretation, was the various ways it avoided beauty, or was even deliberately ugly. But that is part of the strategy Keene identifies: "Tanizaki sees to it that every dramatic moment is followed by its natural let-down" (108). He is working against the tendency towards beauty in some ways, in part because its all about to be bombed out of existence.

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  5. Plenty of folks expect art (or the world generally) to be a mirror, when it's really usually a window.

    Regarding Keene's claim, a lot of the Japanese fiction I've read maintains one tone through the length of the piece, which in a way makes it "flat" in that there are no--in terms of prose--changes in intensity, but certainly that "flatness" of prose is not a gauge of the actual content of the book. Kawabata's Snow Country is an intense read, full of emotion, expressed in gentle and even waves of language.

    I've begun to think that a lot of Japanese fiction from the first 3/4 of the 20th century uses some of the same rules as Henry James: the most important actions are subtle and easily missed, and a good deal is elided, the reader expected to sense that something is missing and ask himself what that is. I don't know enough about Japanese culture to know if this elision is normal in other art forms.

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  6. I've begun to think that a lot of Japanese fiction from the first 3/4 of the 20th century uses some of the same rules as Henry James: the most important actions are subtle and easily missed, and a good deal is elided, the reader expected to sense that something is missing and ask himself what that is.

    I haven't read much Japanese lit (shameful for someone who was actually born in Japan and spent a fair number of years there), but that's a very perceptive observation that fits with what I have read and that I will bear in mind in future. Thanks for that.

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  7. That particular Keene book is good - a punchy 110 pages - but it is 95% about pre-20th century literature. My understanding is that at that point Keene, one of the few real Western experts, had read almost no 20th century Japanese fiction! The section on Makioka, which he calls by another name (it's another Snow novel!), is the introduction of the novel to the West.

    I presume he changed some part of his opinion over time. I was hoping someone readalonging would have a copy of Dawn to the West, published thirty years later, but I guess not.

    I have hardly read any Japanese fiction. That crazy Modernist Kawabata novel from 1930 was in no way flat. Yukio Mishima is not flat. Lots of changes in intensity. The movies I have seen from the period or a bit later - again, not many, but I mean Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi - have lots of variety of tone and intensity.

    Still, this is a giant "I don't know." Most of the important Japanese writers of the 1950s and 1960s, for example, are just names to me, if that.

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  8. Which Mishima? I think of him as pretty restrained. I'm comparing him to writers like Dickens or Lawrence, Nabokov or Dostoyevski or Woolf, folks who are always performing.

    Most of the Japanese films I've seen have Godzilla in them. "Seven Samurai" seems very stagey and mannered to me. What do I know about film.

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  9. I had to remind myself of the Mishima. It's been a while. I'm sure I've forgotten one. The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - completely insane. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - full of shocking things, treated as if shocking. Spring Snow - more snow titles - restrained, yes, but hardly flat. Some events are more important than others. Plus its not 530 pages long.

    Maybe my emphasis has failed. The Makioka Sisters is way, way more avant-garde in its flatness than you think. It is a cousin of Mr. Bailey, Grocer. Sitting motionless for hours can also be a performance.

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  10. Insane and shocking, yes. Lots of murder and assault in Mishima, but I don't see the prose--the narrative tone I mean--responding to the events in the novels. That boy in Sailor is a nasty piece of work, but I don't recall the narrator getting excited about any of it. I haven't read the Makioka Sisters yet, so no comment. Nor have I read, Mr B, Grocer. But I agree about motionlessness being a performance sometimes.

    I guess we can say that Japanese literature of the 20th century is varied and has different effects on different readers. Not so much of a surprise.

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    1. I suppose that means we'll have to actually read all the novels and discuss them, not just make sweeping generalizations, which ups the degree of difficulty for lazy thinkers like me.

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  11. Or just read Dawn to the West or something. Use Keene's generalizations. That's what I would do, if I or anyone had a copy handy.

    I flipped to the last page of Sailor not exactly randomly. I am just saying, look at the verbs - "surging," "teeming," "seething" - "majestic, acclaimed, heroic death unfurled its rapture across his brain" - "The tropical sun blaring across the sky..."

    Nothing in Makioka seethes, teems, or blares.

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  12. The Makioka Sisters is VERY much about beauty. Don’t take my word for it. The Japanese title for this novel is Sasameyuki. According to my Japanese dictionary, the word means two things:

    1. A very fine, falling snow. A kind that scatters here & there. It’s a poetic term suggesting evanescence.

    2. The novel written by Tanizaki Junichiro. The dictionary entry states that it depicts the life & fate of four *beautiful* sisters born in the Semba sector of Osaka. The masterpiece, embodying the author’s view of literature, uses a picture scroll method for showing what happens when traditional ideas of Japanese *beauty* are confronted by modern times.

    Feel free to use Google Translate just to make sure I’m not pulling your leg. The idea of Japanese beauty is central to the novel:

    ささめゆき【細雪】
    小説。谷崎潤一郎作。1946〜48年刊。第二次大戦中に起稿、官憲の干渉で中絶し、戦後に完成。大阪船場生れの美しい四人姉妹の生活と運命とを描く。伝統的な日本美を現代に生かした風俗絵巻で、作者の文学観を具体化した代表作。
    →文献資料[細雪]

    If we put one & one together we get the following: The four beautiful sisters are like “sasameyuki”. They are scattered here & there by the modern age, particularly by the developments of the 1920s & 1930s. They lack the resources to maintain the family’s wealth & standing, one that has been built up within the Osaka business sector over centuries. It took the Makiokas that amount of time to secure their high standards & values, their exceptional class, taste & product. And now all that is beautiful is vanishing within a generation.

    To answer your question about censorship, Tom, Tanizaki used the four beautiful sisters as a reflection of Japan. Like them, the country lacked the resources to maintain their standing. In the country’s case, to fight an insane two front war that spanned the entire Pacific. It’s a subtle critique but a critique nonetheless. Tanizaki’s exceptional skill is shown in the way he depicts the four sisters not realizing what was happening to them. It is all slowly, slowly unraveling. I happen to agree with his aesthetic. History tends to work that way.

    As to Languagehat hinting at my misogyny, I don’t mind him calling me that so long as I get to call him a racist. Special attention paid to beauty is *not* “pop philosophy” to the Japanese.

    Props to Dolce Bellezza for defending a person’s position who wasn’t given the opportunity to defend it himself.

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    1. Oh, don't be silly. I did not say special attention paid to beauty was pop philosophy, I said that about this statement: “That life is full of suffering and tragedy and failure, but without beauty we are nothing.” Which it is. In the second place, I did not call anyone a misogynist, I said "thinking of each woman’s attractiveness" rather than anything else about them is "a terrible way to read and a terrible way to approach half the human race." Which it is. And in the third place, if you'll point me to a Japanese person talking about attention paid to beauty, I'll address what that person says. You, judging by your name, are not Japanese, just someone who thinks they have a proprietary right to pronounce on Japanese culture. If I were into the name-calling game, I'd call that appropriation. As things stand, I'll just suggest you dial down the defensiveness and learn to play well with others.

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    2. Laugh. I *was* pointing to a Japanese person, to Tanizaki Junichiro & the women of his novel (based, as it was, on his wife & her sisters). So far you’ve shown no interest in discussing Tanizaki’s work or the historical context it was set, opting for moral policing instead. Try a little harder next time Mr. Ethnic Name enforcer.

      Tom, I wasn’t calling Languagehat a racist. I was implying that if he was willing to do nothing more than take one sentence out from a lengthy exchange Dolce Bellezza & I had (something you seem to have done too—my line quoted above wasn’t an aphorism—it was plucked & used out of context by both of you) & pass high-handed judgment on it, I would do the same. Nothing more. But I assume you’ve been writing back & forth with Mr. Hat a lot longer than I have entered the scene, so if it’s your prerogative, feel free to kick me out of the club. I won’t mind.

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  13. First, I urge you not to call Languagehat, or anyone else here, a racist. Safely antagonistic seminar behavior, please.

    I, too, found, your approach to the sisters’ “attractiveness” bizarre. Among other things, they are not visible, so there is no basis for judgment. The novel does what novels do, giving us deep access to the interior life of one sister (not that she is so deep), and quite a lot of the exterior life of two others. Why not think of them as people?

    (As an aside, I am baffled by the insistence, in many descriptions of the novel, that it is somehow about four sisters. One of the sisters is barely in the novel, a minor supporting role at best.)

    Thank you for expanding on your idea about the role of beauty in Makioka, which goes far beyond your original aphorism. I am still puzzled by many aspects of it. The sisters are not particularly “scattered, “ for example, nor is any scattering related to anything especially “modern.”
    To the extent that “all that is beautiful is vanishing,” it is because of events external to the characters and the novel, the Big Irony that I write about in the next post. In the 1930s, beauty is not vanishing any more or less quickly than the usual entropic principle would cause. Historically, the unraveling that eventually happens is not slow but extremely fast.

    To be clear, I never thought or claimed that beauty had no part in Tanizaki’s novel, but that the novelist complexly ironizes the role of beauty in Japanese culture and in the characters’ lives. The irony is what the novel (as a form, and this one in particular) does well.

    But I am a long-time skeptic of novelistic beauty. “Beauty week” – four days, I think – starts way back here, and I hope some of my ideas have evolved, but Tanizaki’s novel would fit in.

    Hat: I killed your second comment. I have to approve comments on old posts to bat away the bots.

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    1. You made good points & clarified your position.

      (1) About the movement of historical time, our difference is only philosophical. (2) About Taeko being a minor character. I don’t think we need Woolf levels of interiority to see her as a complex character. Her decision to distance herself from the Makioka tradition which resulted in her getting pregnant speaks to that. That’s not a minor occurrence. The other three sisters speak much & reflect much about Taeko to help fill out the picture. (3) About the “scattered” nature of the four sisters. They live apart, in Kobe & Osaka. Previously the merchant sector of Osaka sufficed. Other than Sachiko, who does her best to keep the family together, the four sisters are presented as having strong wills. They are also presented as keeping their own best interests in mind but not the Makioka’s as a family unit.

      The Makioka Sisters was adapted to television in 2018, updated to the Heisei Era (1989-2019). In the clip below, created by what sounds like a Chinese content creator, the four sisters are presented as upholding beauty standards outside the budget of most ordinary Japanese women. We see the traditional motif of fluttering (or scattering) petals; the assessing of fine art after the father of the four sisters died; at the :48 mark a recreation of the scene that opens the novel where the youngest sister Taeko beautifies the neck of sister Sachiko (which, I don’t know about you, but I was able to see quite vividly from the text); at the 1:05 mark, a marriage matchmaking dinner where, it seems to me, at least, grace, decorum, reserve & class, as part & parcel of beauty standards, are being assessed, which weighs heavily on the action. I am pointing to the filmed version because it seems like some of us are having difficulty seeing the story outside the text.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGZbdHJQLHI&t=256s&ab_channel=%E7%94%B5%E5%BD%B1%E5%A4%A7%E9%AD%94%E5%A4%B4

      Or you can copy & paste the following into YouTube & find the same: 樱花剧《平成细雪》上:千金小姐相亲18次均以失败告终,偏偏却对二婚大叔情有独钟

      I suppose you could say Yukiko’s attractiveness, as a person, has no bearing on the outcome of this matchmaking meeting whatsoever. I don’t see it that way (and neither does the novel): It has great bearing on Yukiko’s fate & future. Part of the reason why Yukiko keeps rejecting one suitor after another is because the men aren’t up to her standards, morally, spiritually, or physically (the actress Ito Ayumi shows this disposition wonderfully by the use of her eyes). This itself is a very modern move for a young woman to take. Her resistance baffles her two older sisters, who, with their traditional values, have accepted bourgeois marriages & can’t understand what Yukiko is thinking. Yukiko’s resistance shows free will in matters of romance that wasn’t common in 1920s & 1930s Japan. Now, of course, it’s the standard.

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  14. There is no club, and thus no kicking out, but rather a sense of what kinds of arguments are useful and which are not. The invocation of a word like “racist” turns the argument into one about the meaning and application of the word. Any sense of trying to learn about the work of art at hand is fruitless. It is too strong a word for the seminar room. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

    Tsuruko is the “minor character,” not Taeko. Having read about the four sisters, I kept waiting for the section or plot line devoted to Tsuruko. No such thing. Tsuruko lives 20 kilometers from the other sisters, who live in the same house. “Scattered,” I don’t get it.

    Thanks for the link to the adaptation. I believe I see a critical difference here. Some of us are having “difficulty seeing the story outside the text” because there is no story outside of the text. An adaptation is an autonomous work of art only incidentally related to the original work, and thus evidence of nothing.

    I was able to “see” the scene you mention, though (even though I could not find it in the Youtube clip – sorry!). Any action in it is literally in one line. “The bright puff moved from Sachiko’s neck down over her back and shoulders” (3-4, tr. Seidenstecker). Then we get a description of Sachiko that, as with many descriptions of people, I do have trouble “seeing”: “Sachiko was by no means round-shouldered, and yet the rich, swelling flesh of the neck and back somehow gave a suggestion of a stoop” (4). The negative construction of the beginning of the sentence suggests that I am not supposed to really see this, exactly.

    My own experience of Japan is limited to one month in Tokyo, mostly in a professional setting, but the “beauty standards” in the film, setting aside that these are actresses in a movie (so every aesthetic effect is heightened), were exactly those upheld by (professional, Tokyo) Japanese women. Seeing, on Saturday, the young women shopping in the department stores in their kimonos – seeing them on the subways with ipods and Western brand shopping bags – was a cultural highlight of Tokyo.

    Yukiko rejects her suitors because she does not want to get married, not because the suitors do not match her standards. She’s going to dig in her heels until the bombs start falling. God knows what will happen then. That’s in the novel we don’t get to read.

    Thanks for the long comments. I am still trying to understand this novel and its status. I appreciate the help.

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